Construction of Unit-Memory MDS Convolutional Codes

Maximum-distance separable (MDS) convolutional codes form an optimal family of convolutional codes, the study of which is of great importance. There are very few general algebraic constructions of MDS convolutional codes. In this paper, we construct a large family of unit-memory MDS convolutional codes over Fq with flexible parameters. Compared with previous works, the field size q required to define these codes is much smaller. The construction also leads to many new strongly-MDS convolutional codes, an important subclass of MDS convolutional codes proposed and studied in [8]. Many examples are presented at the end of the paper. Index Terms Convolutional code, unit-memory code, maximum-distance separable (MDS) codes, strongly-MDS codes, Reed-Solomon code, free distance.